“Our project is a way to keep journalism thriving,” Huang says. “By expanding coverage and freeing reporters from writing the basic game stories, we're giving journalists the time to really focus on the features and analysis that drive readers to their publications.”

To be sure, the program can’t plumb the depths of a slugger’s hitting slump, or report on a manager’s tirade on an umpire, but it can deliver the nuts and bolts of a story.

The StatsMonkey team gave their program story templates to work with (comeback win, blowout win, etc,) and the computer reads the data from the game and spits out some copy.

The applications of such a tool are many and varied -- imagine if your local paper covered every little-league game – but the depth of reporting is implicitly limited. That could change, however, with the next iteration of software. Soon enough, sports reporters could be obsolete.